Honor's Breakfast Remarks

Les Wong
Northern Michigan University
December 17, 2011

Good morning Honor students and your families.  What a proud moment for you.  Congratulations.  A special good morning and welcome to our commencement speaker Dr. Johnnetta Cole.  We are honored to have you here and I am personally grateful for your work and commitment to students.  I look forward to your comments today.  A warm good morning goes to the Board of Trustees.  And to my wife Phyllis, who epitomizes what someone can do, on their own time, for free, unselfishly working to assist and honor students in their quest for a meaningful education.  My thoughts today about “doing the right thing” can be written about you.

This is my 37^th year in higher education and my enthusiasm for higher education has not diminished one iota.  I still believe that an education is what frees us from oppression and puts us on the doorstep of justice and liberation.  As honor students, we expect you to “be smart” as well as “do smart”.  College students amaze me with what you do to utilize your talents, how you learn to control and direct your talent and how you are so unselfish with your talents to serve the public good.  Such energy helps me to understand even the way your talents lead to some mischievous events that, well, “what happens at Northern stays at Northern”.   This morning, the rhetorical question that has been the focus of my meditations for a few months now goes like this:  “what happens to that talent and spirit when you go off into the world?  Why is doing the right thing so easy in college and yet so darn hard once you are into your career?”  Let me offer four observations and if you can help me connect the dots, I’d appreciate it.

Observation number 1.  America is confronting some serious internal challenges.  We are not unlike many countries where good people, well-educated people are wondering if our moral compass is just flat-out broke.  There will always be debate, political mayhem, unrest and protest.  At least the context here in America is the desire to be better, to expect more of ourselves rather than the fight to become free from tyranny and oppression.  And we are witness to a number of organized protests from across the political spectrum.  Yet, I not only hear a lot of criticism of protestors I find it odd that society’s response seems so misdirected.  I do remind myself, loudly and often, that it is our fundamental right to peacefully gather to air our grievances.   Honor students, don’t forget that the right to gather in protest is protected by “which amendment?”  Do you know which amendment to the constitution I’m talking about?  Yes, the very first amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or (my emphasis) “THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE, AND TO PETITION THE GOVERNMENT FOR REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES”.  Aside from the criticism of protestors, the presence of public safety authorities in tactical gear, well armed on American campuses focusing on the behavior of the students gave me great pause about one of our most fundamental rights as citizens of this country.  What was it about the callous and impersonal behavior of the officer in the infamous pepper spraying of students that was so disturbing?  I kept waiting for a fellow officer to walk over as casually as the officer was spraying the students and stop him.  Yes, I wasn’t there, and don’t have the full context, but it would have been nice to see another officer try to do the right thing.

Observation number 2.  Corporate greed remains unchecked.  Income disparities are at their historical worse.  The occupy movement has a point, a darn good one.  And my point?  I share the shame that much of the economic damage wrought upon this country since Enron in 2002-2003 was done by well-educated, university-trained people.  Now, well educated, university trained corporate leaders are sitting on the largest amount of unspent cash holdings as some claim in the history of corporate America, nearly 1.7 trillion dollars.  Is anyone asking them what John Kennedy asked of us?

Observation number 3.  The media noise about the most stupid stuff is now louder and more accessible by more people at an even younger age.  It seems as if the collective intelligence is inversely proportional to the number of channels available.  My car, with satellite radio, allows me to have 30 speed dial buttons with my favorite stations with additional access to over 200 more channels.  My television offers me about 90 channels, but I could add another couple hundred cable channels if I wasn’t so cheap.  All told I listen to 3 radio channels and probably watch 5 stations on a regular basis depending on whether it’s baseball or hockey season.  The power of the media isn’t so much it’s intensity as it is its overwhelming ability to distract you for large amounts of time. And guess what? It’s working and no one seems to care.  Here’s the right thing to do for Northern:  we’ll become the first campus to go television-free!  Imagine the time you can reclaim doing something like reading, learning to draw, learning to play an instrument, listening to poetry, seeing a play.  Ok, that won’t happen but let me be truthful with you:  I am paid to worry about your brain and what you do with it.

Observation number 4:  When I say Penn State, I do not mean to denigrate the university in any shape or form. It remains one of this country’s best.  Sadly it has become today’s catchword or symbol of coaches, priests, politicians, people with power sexually exploiting children, women, the less powerful.  I still remember the rules from Kindergarten:  keep your hands to yourself, wait in line, say please and thank you.  What happened to that?  How can we begin to help people understand that with power comes immense responsibility, the obligation to do the right thing.

I’m not here to use the bully pulpit to rant about the state of the planet or America.  But I do have the expectation, yes, the ideal that once educated, always enlightened.  If more and more parts of our society are going to college shouldn’t we be seeing more of the right stuff and less of the really baffling stuff?

Let me share one vivid childhood memory, I’ll be short but it helps me segue to my closing comments.  I was raised in the rough and tumble world of East Oakland, California.  Athletic and on various teams, I was not unknown in my neighborhood.  Racially mixed and middle class, my notoriety was being the only Chinese kid playing elite baseball where the rest of the roster was African American and much physically bigger.  If anyone could feel what Jackie Robinson felt, I came close.  But I was small (still am).  One day, I watched two big guys start to pound on this little kid for his lunch money and without regard for my own safety I intervened.  I was just fed up.  It wasn’t right.  Surprise was on my side to at least enable the young one to run off.  Well, there I was with two very big guys staring at me.  Well, when you’re young you heal up fast.  I’ve never told anyone not even my parents why it was I was not feeling well for a couple days.  But you know what, I haven’t forgotten that event and especially how good I felt.  Those two guys and others never touched me again.  Point of my story:  I appreciate the Christian message many students wear on their wrist, WWJD, to inspire their actions.  But since that day I also think:  What must I do?  I never had regrets about what I should have done or would have done.  It was up to me to do the right thing.

You see, I’ve come to believe that your parents, your family, a horde of very good and compassionate teachers and professors, your mentors have worked very hard to instill in each of you the basic intellectual and emotional skills so that doing the right thing will be done by students like each one of you.  I have that same, undiminished belief that once educated, you are fundamentally capable of knowing that moment when it is up to you, you will do the right thing.  In closing,

• Your education matters:  At NMU it has been broad and intense.  If we did our job and you did yours, you will live up to John Gardner’s edict:  “Try not to be interesting, be interested” (Collins, 2011).  This gives you the fundamental tools to understand not only what is right and what is not, but the unthinking propensity to act.
• You know what it feels like to “own your own mind”.  Keep working it till you die.  I believe you will be the advance group that will say to an unscrupulous boss, “sorry, sir/madam, I cannot do what you’ve asked me to do, it is not right”.  What if those finance and banking graduates had said that?  Doing the right thing also means you know not to do the wrong thing.
• Think critically about the big stuff and the medium stuff.  I don’t know what to do with the little stuff.  Oppression has no stronger foe than an educated populace.   Jefferson, Paine and Madison had it right.  You are that educated populace and I believe in you.

Please don’t mistake my message this morning.  I am offering each student here the message borne out of my conviction that your education at Northern was meaningful.  You have shown me and others that you care and that you know what it feels like to do the right thing:  Your volunteer service, your service learning hours, your engagement with student clubs and student government, your engagement with faculty and staff in the world of ideas and a new level of friendships.  Each has given you great practice at doing (whisper) the right thing.  And unlike me, you don’t have to hide your injuries while you heal.  You’ve learned and practiced how to ask yourself not only “why” but “why not” and now I’m imploring you to consider “it’s up to me”.  Remember, change begins with you. 

On behalf of all of us at Northern who care about you, we’re proud of what you’ve done to get to this day.  We will be proud of what you will do in the future.   You define our hope for this country if not our planet.

Collins, J., and Hansen, M.T.  (2011).  Great By Choice:  Uncertainty, Chaos, And Luck-Why Some Thrive Despite Them All.  New York:  Harper Collins Publishers.